this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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It sure is possible, I'm currently dual booting win11 and fedora on my laptop, so they actually share a drive.
If you want to do it on one drive I'd recommend first shrinking your windows partition to whatever size your comfortable with in the windows disk management tool (whatever they call it, I don't remember off the top of my head), then when you initialize a Linux mint install it should be able to recognize that windows partition. From there it'll give you the option to either wipe the whole drive, or install in the empty space alongside Windows.
For what it's worth I've had little to no issues dual booting both, it's been working for me just fine. Although I will say, I think I actually have bitlocker encryption disabled, though I can't say for certain and am unable to check at the moment. It would make sense for that to cause issues, so it would definitely be worth looking into.
Quick PSA if you're dual booting from the same drive, the boot partition size is dictated by the windows install. There is chance that when you're doing a system upgrade on linux, when recompiling initramfs is necessary, you run out of space on the boot partition since linux makes a fallback/backup on the boot partition. This might block you from upgrading unless you manually delete (and backup) the images and run mkinitcpio -P manually. Note that this may result in bricking your system, but it isn't hard to fix if you have some experience.
Thank you for your post. I think I will use two different drives and hopefully use Windows as little as possible.
For sure the ideal scenario. I wish you luck friend